Telling Stories for the Post-Text World

(I acknowledge the irony of using the written word to comment on its de-emphasis.)

Last this month, the New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo headlined a collective of reporters cataloging the trends shaping the digital world.

The takeaway? While words still matter, video, images and audio have taken the lion’s share of our attention from text-based content — attention spans which were already lagging behind that of a goldfish.

From the longform journalism of the New York Times’ podcast The Daily to Google’s ambitious Accelerated Mobile Pages format for publishers, major media players are embracing new ways to create, publish and distribute their content. Our increasingly digitized lifestyle also presents new opportunities for marketers and PR pros to rethink the way we tell stories using fewer words, and more, rich content, such as:

Sound. With more than 70 million Americans listening to at least one podcast each week, podcasts have become the new blogs. The spoken word provides unique ways to share messages, through existing podcasts or new ones attached to a specific company, brand or cause.

We all know the media landscape is changing (again). My colleague Tina Cassidy recently shared her conversation with a senior editor at a major news outlet. No one is reading the glut of news, and publishers are favoring “fewer stories, but more impactful ones.” PR is staying apace, so the time has come to shed our “more is better approach” and, instead, focus on generating fewer, better stories targeted at key audiences, measured with real data.

As communicators, the post-text world simultaneously changes everything — and nothing. The assets may be more visual, but the foundation — a strong story, grounded in authenticity and extended with a unique point of view — remains critical.